Your dream list
A question we find ourselves bringing to clients more than most questions is some version of: “what would this look like if, ~6 months from now, it had all gone really well?”
This can untie someone who is in knots or affirm someone unsure about what to do next or settle someone who is struggling to weigh the relative importance of different time-consuming decisions. We’ve found it useful for clients who have heard it from us before. The anchoring pull, the gravity, of what has just happened and what is happening now is very strong. It can dominate the attention of even the most galaxy-brained.
This makes “what would success look like from a future vantage point” good for levering out of a quagmire. It’s also useful when you’re pre-quagmire, in an early and open design phase. In that mode, the question could take a variety of other forms:
6-12 months from now, you’re working for your dream list of clients. Who is on that list?
6-12 months from now, you call your partner to say you had the best day ever at work - what happened?
6-12 months from now, the employee who you’re considering firing has completed a remarkable turnaround. What are they doing and what are they no longer doing?
-ben and eric
Beware the board-based bonus, part 1
If you run a non-profit, you likely need help fundraising to keep that non-profit going. Maybe one way you’ve addressed this is recruiting financially-minded board members with well-heeled networks. If those board members worked in finance, they’ll be drawn to offer solutions from the world of finance.
One such solution I often encounter and just as often dislike is the performance-based bonus. In some fields, that bonus is nearly a sacred institution. People stake their futures on it. They buy houses and enroll their kids in schools in expectation of it. Folks in these fields take it as a given that bonuses are a) what good, mature organizations do and b) strongly motivating for good, mature professionals.
For most non-profits I’ve coached, led, or worked for, I haven’t found a) and b) to hold true. Good, mature pros and their good, mature organizations benefited more from bonus dollars getting allocated in other ways.
-eric
Beware the board-based bonus, part 2
I generally dislike bonuses in the non-profit context, despite generally favoring above-median compensation wherever possible. Some reasons for this and some alternatives I like better:
Reasons (a few; not an exhaustive list)
In industries where a bonus works well, performance of the firm and the individual are often measured in dollars. There’s a logic here that’s conceptually obvious and concretely observable. You did a good job, so the firm got more money, so you get some of that money. This doesn’t apply for most non-profits. By definition, their performance may not be indexed to their revenue at all. The weak logic model makes for weak motivation.
In many non-profits, the size of the bonus has to be small in relative and absolute terms. It’s a low percentage of annual compensation and the total number of dollars may be (well) under four figures. No one could make a real estate decision in expectation of the bonus. It feels weird to me to (potentially) withhold this amount of money from someone on the assumption that it is an effective stick or carrot for an entire year of work. (Note: I am not claiming that anyone, given the choice, would leave $500 on the table.)
Lots of variation here but: if you’re working at most non-profits, you’re foregoing higher pay you could be getting elsewhere. The mission, the culture, the location matter more to you than sheer dollars. My personal take is the organization owes you the most affirming, healthy working conditions it can deliver within its financial constraints. It’s a way to soften and humanize a tough tradeoff and it’s the right thing to do. A bonus is an inefficient, oblique stab at this. Wrong tool for the job. There are better ways (see alternatives below).
(maybe actually 1b): Because performance can be hard to measure in dollars, boards have to invent other criteria. They are often bad at this. Even when they are good at it, they have to decide, usually near the end of the year, whether the ED or the team met the criteria. They are often bad at this, too. By bad, I mean - slippery, intellectual shifty, epistemically suspect. One version: If an ED has done a fine but not fantastic job, the board doesn’t want to withhold the bonus because that feels punitive. So they give the bonus. Or, if there’s a proportional option, they give the same proportion they gave last year, even if performance was meaningfully different year-over-year. The so-called performance bonus effectively becomes delayed salary (you’re going to get it every year but you have to wait until the end of the year). Why make people wait?
Alternatives
Use the modest bonus pool to elevate base salary instead.
And, if possible, set up a scheduled cost of living adjustment.
Narrow the scope and specify the source of the financial incentive. Instead of “hustle all year in hopes that budget magic occurs and you get a bonus from the board-managed heavens,” see if there’s something available that’s more like, “as a team, we’re chasing x award, due in 90 days. If we get the award, we all share it equally.”
Increase PTO. In the US, give the team the whole week of Thanksgiving. If possible with the seasonality of your work, give them back the week between Christmas and New Year’s. This one I like in particular because it’s the rare place where the organization can afford true generosity. The marginal day (even week) of PTO might not cost the organization anything at all.
Look at tweaking or upgrading other benefits. Can the org cover dental premiums? What about matching 401k/403b contributions by another percentage point or two?
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Writer Oliver Burkeman on attention
To describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals – such as food, money, and electricity – are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.
Writer Tressie McMillan Cottom on listening to Dolly Parton
One day, I turned on college radio to drown out the silence. Dolly’s 1968 song “The Bridge” was playing. It wasn’t the first time I heard it. It was the first time I understood the young girl in it, pregnant, abandoned, contemplating suicide to end the pain. The juxtaposition of that pain and Dolly’s high, lonesome voice broke me wide open. I cried for the first time for everything I would not have. When I was done crying, I was the person I would be after loss.
Composer Matthew Aucoin on Dylan Mattingly’s music
I think that his commitment to impractical and borderline impossible projects has proved more than worthwhile. He has summoned into being a region of musical experience that’s all his own, a welcoming, abundant, sun-drenched landscape that teems with tinkling, deliriously retuned pianos and raucous grooves that last long enough to offer a taste of infinity.